What is escalation of commitment?

Escalation of commitment is a concept in personal epistemology: Spend minimal time on easily reversible decisions and maximum time on irreversible ones.

Example: You are deciding between two project management tools for your team. If you choose wrong, switching costs you a weekend of data migration and some minor frustration. Now compare that to accepting a job offer that requires relocating your family to another country, selling your house, and pulling your children from their school. Both are decisions. They demand radically different amounts of deliberation. The project management tool is a two-way door — walk through, look around, walk back if you do not like it. The relocation is a one-way door — once you have sold the house, uprooted the kids, and left the job you had, the path back does not exist in the same form. Treating these two decisions with the same level of analysis is a category error. The first deserves thirty minutes. The second deserves thirty days.

This concept is part of Phase 23 (Decision Frameworks) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for decision frameworks.